Screenwerk recently posted the top 50 U.S. properties for May 2008. Many of those properties are locally-oriented sites. Two of the top 6 in fact are sites that no business should overlook for their PPC oportunities, and one other one is great for local free classified advertising. Those three sites are:

• Craigslist
• Superpages
• Yellowpages.com

Craigslist, of course, is the site that allows you to list free classifieds. The other two sites also offer free listings, but you are much better off upgrading to a paid listing. Notice that both of these sites are yellow pages type sites. Online business advertising, even (and maybe especially) for local businesses is quickly replacing the print yellow pages. It won’t be long when those old print editions will be obsolete and virtually all local advertising will be done online.

If you have a local business and you want to attract targeted customers then I highly recommend that you check out Superpages and Yellowpages.com. These sites are the future of local business advertising.

Free line? Sounds good doesn’t it? Well, it is.

You can add a free line to your Pay Per Click ad just by doing one simple thing with your local Pay Per Click ad. Name your city.

That’s it. It’s that simple. If you own an automotive parts store in Topeka, Kansas and you write the following ad:

Auto Parts Topeka
Get auto parts for your used car
Foreign And Domestic
www.abc.com

Your ad will have a fifth line just below your destination URL that is placed there by Google and will tell searchers that your business is in Kansas. It’s almost like an editorial endorsement. If you write your ad with the headline “Auto Parts” and leave off Topeka then you don’t get the fifth line.

This also works if you just include the state. For instance, if you are a corporate law attorney that services the entire state of Florida and you write an such as this:

Florida Corp Attorney
Incorporation, litigation, trademark
Corporate legal advice - free cons.
www.abc.com

You’ll get the Google-added free line for that as well. All you have to do is give your specific geographic location and you’ll get the fifth line. It’s free.

Plus, if you are listed in Google Maps then searchers will see a map with pinpoints for local businesses related to your keyword, so you’ll have another level of free advertising. Just a quick, simple way to make the most of your local Pay Per Click advertising.

This is the best article I’ve seen on Microsoft’s desire to own Yahoo yet. The reason I think it’s significant, and relevant, is because it addresses the need to acquire additional search traffic in two key areas: Local and Mobile.

In case you aren’t paying attention, local and mobile search are two of the fastest growing areas of search right now. Online advertising depends a great deal on the growth of these two key areas. In fact, if it weren’t for search then online advertising would not even be an industry. Advertisers are there to capture the search market. After all, that’s where the people are.

The author points out, correctly, that search and advertising go hand in hand. To dominate one, you must dominate the other. The reason Google is the leading advertising provider online right now is because Google owns the search market. Microsoft knows this. That’s why an acquisition of a large property like Yahoo is so important to them.

The fact is, and I think most people watching the search industry right now know this, if Microsoft does not acquire Yahoo then any chance that it ever had to compete with Google in the area of search or advertising will be gone. But I like the article for another reason as well. The author compares the local and mobile search products of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in order to show how they fare right now. It’s the two areas of search that have no real dominant player - there is still a competitive playing field. And it’s growing, which means that future success in online search and advertising will depend a lot on these two key growing areas. Maybe Microsoft is thinking about that and maybe that’s why Yahoo is so attractive to them. And maybe Yahoo knows it and that’s why they are playing coy. The question now is, now what?

This paragraph at WebProNews can be a bit misleading:

Galen De Young, managing director of Francis SEO, says research suggests b2b customers overwhelmingly ignore PPC ads in favor of organic listings. That and local search often fails to present businesses that serve a larger area than just their home base, or also nearby cities.

I’d never discount the value of SEO. That would be foolhardy. But most PPC campaigns fail to deliver positive results because the advertisers either don’t understand PPC optimization practices or used the wrong strategies. It isn’t the fault of the advertising.

If you look at PPC as a lot like newspaper advertising then you’ll do it better. Let’s say you run a company that is based out of Wayzata, Minnesota. If you have locations in other areas outside of that specific geographic area then you should have a PPC campaign and a landing page for each location, not just one campaign for the entire business. The reason is because your customers are not going to drive all over Timbuktu looking for your locations. They want the one that is closest to them.

If you were running newspaper advertisements to drive traffic to your brick and mortar store at various locations, you would either list your locations by address in the same ad and run that ad in every local newspaper in the areas that you serve or run a separate ad in each newspaper with the address of the closest store for that area. With PPC, the first option is not an option. You have limited space to tell your story, unlike a newspaper ad.

That’s why you need to limit each PPC campaign to one particular service area. Each store should have its own ad and should be focused on reaching consumers that will search for that store within the specific geographic area in which that store exists. When you do that effectively then you’ll understand the high value of PPC. If you aren’t doing it that way then you’ll likely go sour on PPC long before you realize it’s true potential.

Google AdWords is testing the inclusion of local addresses in their pay per click ads. So far, Screenwerk, SERoundtable, Vertical Leap, and Blumenthals have all reported on it.

Blumenthals provided an acknowledgment from Google stating that it was an experiment, though the blog didn’t say where the acknowledgment came from. It likely came from an e-mail query. Nevertheless, here is what Google said:

The address in the ad is actually something that we are currently testing with a small set of advertisers.

That’s just one line from the acknowledgment, but it’s pretty clear that the experiment was done. But was it successful? Will Google continue the practice in the future?

Matt Hopkins says local search will be the fastest growing area of search in the next year. I believe he may very well be right. That means local pay per click advertising will grow as well and those local businesses that learn how to make local pay per click work for them will be the benefactors of attracting new customers. I hope Google AdWords does roll out the address listing for local businesses in their PPC ads completely and fully. If local pay per click grows as some of us believe it will then that is a distinct possibility.

Many local businesses haven’t discovered pay per click advertising yet. They’re still trying to marketing themselves online the old fashioned way: Local Search. Only local search isn’t exactly so old fashioned.

Of course, SEO has been around for a few good years. Pay per click is still relatively new and local search as local search even newer. Most small business owners are just now trying to figure out the search game, period. But if you can beat your competitors to the punch and figure out the rules to local search and local PPC then you’ll have a powerful marketing strategy down pat.

Local search uses all the tools available through effective SEO to market your local businesses to the search engines so that local customers can find you more easily. It’s SEO, but it’s a more specific type of SEO in that you are targeting a specific geographic area. Local PPC relies on the same principles, but in terms of pay per click advertising instead of search. Companies that successfully learn how to make local PPC and local search work for them have a huge leg up over the competition. The bottom line is how effective you are at researching your keywords and putting them to work for you.